Happy Easter

11 Apr Happy Easter

Look what arrived at our house yesterday. Sunshine AND chocolate. Does it get any better than that?

These eggs came home with Andrew in a fancy container with a hinged lid. Their pastel shells encase gourmet milk chocolate, and a single container cost more than three dozen hen’s eggs. I could be wrong, but I think three dozen was the number my mother used to hard boil for dying at Easter.

As kids, we used to colour Easter eggs at the kitchen table, which Mom would cover liberally with layer upon layer of newspaper. We wore aprons which soon became streaked with dye. After a couple hours of dipping and dunking we’d leave the soggy rainbow of a kitchen table with stained fingers and some colourful eggs.

Those with a steady hand created striped eggs, but being impatient, I preferred the drop-and-leave method, which meant mine were always monochromatic. I made eggs of soft robin’s egg blue, leaf green and tangerine orange. My attempts at burgundy were often thwarted when someone complained that I was hogging the red dye cup. Every once in a while I’d forget the rules of paint mixing and drop a blue egg into the orange cup. What emerged was so ugly it should have been hidden and never found.

When we were done, all the eggs, worthy and otherwise, got piled into brightly coloured wicker baskets and put on display. I felt immense pride as I toured visiting relatives through my creations. I don’t remember eating chocolate eggs at Easter back then. I only remember the ones we coloured to childish perfection with the only kit on the market.

I also remember the egg salad sandwiches that inevitably followed. If a shell cracked while the egg boiled, the white would get stained when we dyed it. The resulting Easter egg salad was often as colourful as our baskets, which Mom said extended the fun.

These eggs are much smaller than the ones of my childhood — the size of a quail’s egg at most.

They come in four soft colours with varying degrees of speckling.

And they will not produce so much as one mouthful of egg salad.

But that’s okay. I don’t like egg salad. So these eggs suit me just fine.